The Rise of the Groveland Boys: A Pulitzer-Winning Civil Rights Story

• Winner: 2013 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
• Nominated: 2013 Edgar Award
• Book of the Year: 2012 – The Boston Globe & Christian Science Monitor

In 1949, Florida’s orange industry thrived on cheap Jim Crow labor, maintained by a violent sheriff, Willis V. McCall. When a white seventeen-year-old girl in Groveland accused four young Black men of rape, the Ku Klux Klan erupted into the town, burning homes and chasing hundreds into the swamps, intent on lynching the young men who became known as the Groveland Boys.

Into this deadly fray stepped Thurgood Marshall, the man known as "Mr. Civil Rights" and one of the most important American lawyers of the twentieth century. Despite threats to his life and the murder of an NAACP associate, Marshall fought tirelessly for justice, challenging one of the darkest chapters of Florida history.

Drawing on never-before-published materials, including the FBI's unredacted Groveland case files and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund archives, King sheds new light on Marshall’s heroism. This gripping narrative not only recounts a pivotal civil rights battle but also examines the systemic injustices that made the fight for equality both necessary and perilous.

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